Great Wine Made Simple - Andrea Immer [18]
WINE TASTING
Drink Your Words—Tasting Dry, Crisp, Oaky, and Tannic
My wine students love this tasting because it is such an eye-opener. This is how it works. We taste a total of eight wines, grouped in pairs, with one pair to illustrate each of the major style terms in the Wine Buyer’s Toolbox:
As with our tasting in Chapter 1, you have a few options. Choose whatever seems most convenient.
Option 1 Taste all four wine pairs in one sitting. This is what I do with my wine students. It takes less than an hour, and really helps to cement the meanings of each style term, because you can compare them to one another. If you don’t have enough glasses to pour all eight wines at once, taste one pair at a time, empty your glasses, and pour the next pair. No need to rinse or wash the glasses between pairs.
If you do plan to taste all the wines in one sitting, taste the pairs in the order shown in the table, from dry to tannic. In Chapter 1, we tasted the wines from lightest to fullest in body. Look at this list; we are following the same pattern (remember, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay—light-, medium-, full-bodied). It is always best to taste wines from lightest to fullest, just as you traditionally serve the lightest food courses (salad or fish) in a meal first, ending with the heaviest (meat or cheese or dessert). This progression allows your mouth to gradually warm up to stronger tastes. Doing the tasting in reverse, tasting full-bodied wines first, can leave lingering flavors in your mouth that overpower the lighter wines to follow.
Option 2 Taste each wine pair on its own, whenever it is convenient. A good way to do this is to plan a dinner around one of the wine pairs. Do your tasting, then sit down to dinner and enjoy the wines with your meal. It is an easy thing to do at home, whether you are cooking or ordering take-out.
CHOICES, CHOICES
Choice is what going to restaurants is all about. You get to taste lots of different things, and you don’t have to shop, cook, or do the dishes. And the trend just keeps growing. Restaurants across the country are offering more wines by the glass than ever, adding tasting menus, half-glasses, shared plates, and so on, all of which increases your tasting options for wines, and for different wine and food combinations.
This is also one of my favorite tastings to do with restaurant guests, especially if they can’t decide which wine to choose. “You don’t have to choose,” I tell them. As with most good eateries these days, we offer a range of wines by the glass in the restaurants I work with. I simply offer my guests one of these pairs, by the glass or half-glass, so they have the chance to compare them, side by side. It is fascinating to taste the style differences, and to learn how trying the wines with food changes your perception of the taste. Sometimes your second-favorite of the wines will move into the top spot when tasted with food.
Tasting Setup: The Steps
Step 1. Buy the wines, choosing from the following list:
For each style term, choose one wine from List A, and one from List B.
Step 2. Chill the white wines.
By the way, do not worry if they warm up a little as you’re tasting. The exact serving temperature doesn’t matter very much; in fact, overchilling wines mutes their flavor.
Step 3. Set up your glasses.
You will want to number the glasses as we did in the first tasting, with pieces of paper or a numbered placemat, especially if you are pouring all eight wines at once. And you may very well be doing this. I have a wine-loving friend who doesn’t have a wine cellar because she doesn’t have the storage space, and she doesn’t like to wait years to drink a bottle, anyway. But she does have seven dozen